Skin Read Free Page A

caught her attention. The skimpily clad woman in the ad for Club Paradise did kind of look like her. Realizing that was the gentlemen’s club where those women who’d been killed had worked, she shivered.
    Long dark hair, big dark eyes, distinctive features. The woman could be her twin.
    Or her kid sister.
    Staring at the photo made her stomach knot. Lilith fingered the heart-half she still faithfully wore and remembered the last time she’d seen Hannah...
    “You’ll come back to see me, right?” Hannah sounds every bit the frightened little girl. “Swear to God?”
    Lilith splits the gold heart Daddy bought into its two halves. Her real father was nothing like the horror in the holier-than-thou trappings her mother remarried. She places one half of the heart on a length of chain held together with a tiny gold safety pin.
    “Turn around.”
    Lilith hooks the chain around her sister’s neck, replaces her own, then nestles her bruised cheek against her sister’s. Lilith stares at their dark-haired images, so similar. But inside, Hannah is like Mama. Quiet and afraid and obedient.
    “We’re like this heart,” Lilith says softly, stroking her little sister’s hair. “Two halves of a whole. No one and nothing will keep us apart for long.”
    But of course something had.
    Lilith took another look at the ad. No, it simply couldn’t be Hannah, not right here in Chicago, not practically under her nose. She chucked the newspaper into the recycle bin, and yet, she couldn’t rid herself of the notion.
    What if it was?
    Shaking the thought away, she left the break room.
    By the time Lilith got back to her desk, the phone was ringing. And then her boss had a rush job for her. She forgot all about the possibility of going to a movie with Elena until the last minute. Back to the break room. The newspaper was still in the recycle bin.
    Her pulse picking up a beat, she stared down at it. How ridiculous was she being? She grabbed up the paper, but rather than the movie section, her gaze went straight back to that photograph.
    Hannah?
    It couldn’t be. Just couldn’t.
    After tossing the paper again, all thoughts of movies quashed, she rushed out of the building and raced to her bus stop like her life depended on it. A buzz went through her and her head went light. What if that was Hannah? A girl on the streets – how many work opportunities did someone like that have?
    oOo
    A HALF HOUR LATER, Lilith was glad to rush up the stairs to her third floor apartment in a greystone six-flat, even happier to be greeted at the door by a loud, “Me-e-ow!”
    She picked up the cat and took comfort in the big ball of warmth. “You’ve been neglected, haven’t you?”
    Claws hooked in the front of her sweatshirt, and Valkyrie purred contentedly. Lilith crossed the first floor living area filled with more plants than furniture and opened the door to the small balcony with its pots of flowers and herbs. Their light fresh scent welcomed her. The cat’s ears twitched, and she made funny little noises deep in her throat, but she was content to be held and cuddled. Animals never forgot a kindness, and no doubt this one still remembered being lost and Lilith rescuing her.
    Lilith knew the feeling of being lost on her own all too well. She’d given the cat a second chance at a full and happy life. Now if only she could do the same for herself. Everything had changed for her when Hannah ran.
    During those first months when she was in college, determined to make a new life for them all, she’d called her little sister at least once a week. And every time, Hannah had cried and begged her to come get her. As if Lilith could have. Even if she quit school and got a job, no way would child services let her have custody. Mama had always protected the bastard she’d married, had never filed a complaint against him. Having to leave her little sister in that situation, even temporarily, had broken her heart. And when Hannah finally ran, she’d blamed